KevinMD's Take, April 6, 2015

There was a little Twitter dustup last week, with the Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, tweeting out that he'd like quarterly baseline lab tests ... just because more data are better.

Policy wonks responded as you would expect: More data aren't better. The danger of false positives leads to unnecessary tests. Routine labs go against the evidence.

The problem is, the wonks' stance is counter-intuitive and despite their best efforts, will be heard by the deaf ears of the public. It's an uphill battle.

I think Andrew Holtz has a smart take over at HealthNewsReview.org. He writes: "Our advertising streams will soon blossom with 'just so you know' pitches for biometric devices and apps. Barriers of cost and effort will crumble. Data will flow. It will flow into a void of understanding, but the sad reality that we don’t know what to do with all this personal data won’t stop it from engulfing us."

So even if Mark Cuban sees the light and backtracks on his more-testing stance (doubtful), patients have access to devices that record more personal data than ever.

Rather than telling these patients "No," we need to find a way to interpret the torrent of data that is bound to come physicians' way very soon.

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